Once again, Ronaldo fails when the stage is set for greatness

Monday 21 May 2007 18.39 EDT
First published on Monday 21 May 2007 18.39 EDT

Maybe it is time to reassess what we mean by greatness. The greats surely choose these blue-riband occasions to demonstrate what it is that distinguishes them and it is not enough to excel in earlier rounds or humdrum league wins against mid-table sides. Finals provide stages for greatness to be measured, the ultimate moments of truth, the points of maximum impact.

So how does Cristiano Ronaldo feel today? Sir Alex Ferguson spoke of the 22-year-old playing against the debilitating effects of fatigue, he talked of the slow playing surface and Chelsea's smothering tactics. But the truth is an uncomfortable one for the Manchester United manager after telling anyone who cared to listen in the weeks running up to this final that Ronaldo stood hand and shoulders above anyone as the best player on the planet. The truth, evidently, is something different.

To criticise Ronaldo after he has won enough individual honours to fill a museum is not done lightly, or without regret. His sympathisers may argue, too, that it is unfair to judge a player on one scratchy performance when he has consistently bedazzled us this season. Yet the FA Cup final is not just another game.

This was the day Ronaldo should have validated all those claims of authentic greatness - just as Steven Gerrard did for Liverpool in the last FA Cup final at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff - and showed an understanding that being a great footballer does not automatically establish him as a football great. Instead, the most extravagantly gifted player on show went AWOL.

"It's going to be difficult for me to forget," was Ronaldo's candid assessment of a match which aroused suspicions that he is still fine-tuning the qualities of competitive intent so important at sport's highest level.

His performances in the last World Cup do not hint at such vulnerability - and the befuddled defenders of Roma may find the suggestion ludicrous after the manner in which he tormented Serie A's second-placed team in the Champions League quarter-finals - but the more thoughtful United supporters will accept that Ronaldo's peripheral, and unusually maladroit, display on the Wembley pitch was not the first time he has failed to respond in a game that has been deliciously set up for him.

Ferguson was also required to find excuses for the winger after his disappeared in the defeat by Benfica last season that eliminated United from the Champions League's group stages and is now remembered as the club's 21st-century nadir.

It was the same a year earlier when Ronaldo belonged to the edges of a harrowing night against Milan at San Siro and that experience was repeated with even more brutality in the semi-finals earlier this month. Ronaldo was not only eclipsed by Kaka, Milan's sweetly gifted Brazilian, but he was a long way behind Andrea Pirlo, Gennaro Gattuso and, in particular, Clarence Seedorf in terms of influence, judgment and nerve.

Paulo Ferreira, a full-back who has seldom been regarded as impenetrable since becoming one of Jose Mourinho's first signings for Chelsea, nullified Ronaldo so well in the opening hour the undisputed footballer of the year eventually swapped flanks to see if he would get any more joy against Wayne Bridge. He did not. There was one occasion when he cut inside the left-back, but he finished the run by shooting harmlessly into the side netting. And that was pretty much it.

The lesson is that we - "we" being the public, the media and, unusually for him, Ferguson - were maybe misguided, certainly premature, when we dared to believe that Ronaldo had already eclipsed previous incumbents of the No7 shirt, such as David Beckham and Eric Cantona, and could realistically be put on the same pedestal as Pele, Diego Maradona, Johan Cruyff and George Best.

Any old-timer at Old Trafford - if they are being absolutely honest - will admit that Best had the occasional stinker, too. Nonetheless, he would generally thrive on the bigger occasions. Ronaldo seemed to shrivel. Blame it on fatigue, the pitch, the opposition, but it was his inability to have any influence that sent the final on its downward spiral into anti-climax and tedium. Astonishingly, Ronaldo hardly managed a cross worthy of the description all afternoon.

Most exciting player in the world? Certainly. But that does not make him the most influential and until he makes the crossover we should be careful, Ferguson included, not to warp what greatness truly means.